


Be Running

by suliswrites



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, Imprisonment, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:21:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26632777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suliswrites/pseuds/suliswrites
Summary: The light has fallen. Nymphadora Tonks awaits her fate and receives an unlikely visitor.
Relationships: Lucius Malfoy/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Remus Lupin/Nymphadora Tonks
Comments: 62
Kudos: 64
Collections: Sing Me a Rare: UK Invasion!





	Be Running

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sing Me a Rare: The UK Invasion. Much love to my beta and alpha Constance + ketos , for all your help and support with this story. 
> 
> Song Prompt – RUNNING UP THAT HILL - KATE BUSH

By the end, Narcissa Malfoy had pleaded for death. It was then that Dora thought she’d finally glimpsed her mum in her aunt’s face. 

She was made to watch with the rest of them. Forced into a circle around the Malfoy family, restrained by bruising hands. Unable to look away. 

After all those years fighting, Harry had fallen in the course of a single breath. The spectacle of Narcissa’s execution took hours. 

“Mark this: A traitor’s death.” 

Voldemort had announced it, thin lips curling to bare strange teeth, gesturing to them in the round like some sick ringmaster. 

Only an hour had passed since she’d watched Remus fall beside her. All that light whispering away from amber eyes. Only an hour, and she could barely catch her breath enough to process that they’d lost.

One thought looped in her mind, roaring loud enough to try to blot the rest out —

_Teddy. Teddy safe with Mum. They won’t find him. They won’t find him._

The mother and son in front of her had no such shelter.

Her cousin was openly sobbing like a small child. He practically _is_ a child, Dora thought. 

Voldemort smiled as he urged Draco to take up his wand and cast the Cruciatus on his Mother. 

Draco’s pale hands shook gripping the wand, shoulders hunched over as though he could crumple in on himself.

Lucius Malfoy stood wandless, helpless, wavering on his feet. “My Lord—” 

Forced to his knees with a swift flick of Bellatrix’s wrist. 

Narcissa’s sister lowered her wand, watching the unfolding scene with chilling apathy. Her own sister. Though if she could abandon one sibling, Dora thought, why not a second?

Narcissa held her son’s eye, and nodded to him. Inconceivable stillness. Urgency. Love. Dora felt she knew her thoughts as her own; _My life for yours. I forgive you. Do this to survive._

After a stifled gulp, Draco gasped the incantation. _“Cru— Crucio—”_

His wand, to no one's surprise, produced no spell. He did not and could not mean it. 

Voldemort advanced on him, tilting his head. “What use are you to me if you cannot cast a simple curse, boy?” 

Still on her knees, Narcissa looked to her husband in desperation, a wide-eyed terrible plea. 

Lucius Malfoy threw himself at Voldemort’s feet. “Mercy, my lord. Allow me to serve—”

Serene satisfaction flooded Voldemort’s eyes as he gazed down at the once proud wizard kissing the hem of his robes. 

“I am most merciful,” Voldemort said, laying his skeletal palm on the pale blond head before him in gentle caress. 

Silence held in the air. It seemed not one person in the circle could take a breath. 

“Hand the wand to your father, Draco.”

Lucius was to his son in an instant, taking the wand from his trembling hands, pushing Draco behind him. Draco lurched forward with a cry but Lucius shoved him back again forcefully.

“Watch, now,” Voldemort commanded. “Your Father will show you. Teach him, Lucius.” 

Dora almost missed the brief look that passed between husband and wife before the spell was spoken. Something unnamable whispered in their eyes, before his went dead. Cold and unseeing.

She hoped there was more within him than the swift, unfeeling torture that burst from his wand without hestiation, that his poise, his steel-gazed, unwavering precision, wasn’t as callous as it looked. She hoped it was the performance he had to give. 

But she could find no comfort in hope alone. Instead she watched, without it.

A son, pleading and sobbing. 

A father, cursing and torturing. 

A mother, contorting and screaming. 

. . . . 

Straw can be remarkably comforting, if you’re completely starkers and it’s the only thing between you and the damp, frigid stone. Four days of this hell hole and they feel like fourty.

The scrap of a blanket she’s clutching around her is a nice touch on their part. A suspiciously humane gesture. Why give comfort to a creature before you slaughter it? And there — she’s answered her own question. Twisted sodding tyrants. 

Today is the day she dies. 

Unless the nameless guards were simply fucking with her when they opened the door and told her _this is your last morning, halfblood._

They likely could have been - fucking with her. But Dora has heard yelling, dragging, guards laughing through the thick, windowless door. One muffled voice a day.

She couldn’t see any of them in her isolation, but she’d recognized some of their voices. 

Molly. Kings. Neville. 

None of them had begged as they’d been dragged from their cells to their execution. Spat and cursed defiance, more like. But then, Dora supposes they might all have begged by the end. 

Her aunt may have been many things, but she was not weak — and even she begged. By the twentieth round of Cruciatus, Narcissa had begged her own husband to end it. 

And he had. 

Dora wonders whether she will plead for death by the end too. What a bloody dramatic way to go. She feels no shame in pleading for pain to end, but still, she doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction. Perhaps she’ll get lucky and bite her tongue so badly during the Cruciatus that her pleas will be unintelligible. Could she make sure of it? She’ll try. 

Strategy is soothing. There is so little she has control of. Planning to put your tongue in the way of your teeth while seizing from agony feels damn right empowering. 

Remus would shake his head at her. That double curved line would peak in the corner of his mouth, inching up his cheek. His hidden grin. 

Another sob almost heaves its gag through her. She swallows it back. 

_Teddy. Teddy safe with Mum. They won’t find him. They won’t find him._

They’d made a plan. If she and Remus didn’t come back. Remus had insisted. There was a safe house. It was far away. And they were there. Together. Unplottable. Survivors. _They won’t find him._

“No loss is singular,” Remus said to her once. Dora’d laughed and mussed his hair and called him her silly, glum, philosopher. “So _serious,”_ she’d teased, then commenced a decidedly un-solemn tickle-attack. 

She hears him now; understands. It took losing everything to learn it, but she has. 

Every loss was a string of losses, swirling down a sink like some twisted chain of memories, pulled one after the other into the dark. 

Dramatic again. Oy Dora you’re losing it, she thinks, nesting into the straw and tipping her head back against the wall. 

Her body feels heavy and foul. Wrong, in the way that a stream brought to stillness is wrong to the point of festering. 

The grief has voided her of her gift. She could not will a single freckle to paint upon her nose if she summoned every spark of her metamorphmagus magic. 

Her wand being taken and snapped felt nothing to this. She wants so badly to escape the confines of her body, to change, to burst forth the colors and shapes she knows to be her true self. For her heartbreak to strip her of this deepest, internal gift — 

She feels more trapped in her own skin than in this bloody cell. 

The cell itself stinks. Blood and feces will do that. Clammy, everywhere. It’s dark inside, but not particularly small. Though it feels it, now, as the door unexpectedly clangs open and _he_ enters the room. 

Breath seizes in her chest. Murderer. 

Malfoy stands broad and stark in front of the door, towering above her. Drowning in black, the platinum of his hair almost blindingly harsh against it. She loathes him in his handsome eminence. A veneer over a rancid soul. 

The door rings shut behind him and he’s staring at her, up and down in silence. New tarnishes of purple and age are sunk under his eyes; a strange imperfection on his face. 

The coarse blanket around her doesn’t hide much, but Dora is beyond any qualms about her nudity. Malfoy, however, seems to find either it or the smell distasteful, as the familiar sneer at his lips fastens into place.

They stare at one another for several moments. 

Then he reaches up for the clasp at his neck. He shrugs his heavy floor-length cloak off his shoulders. Holds it out to her. 

Dora continues to stare up at him. She could laugh at the ridiculous tableau: Death Eater in state of offering. His large hand black like the rest of him, gloved in shining leather. 

A frustrated breath huffs through his nose and he steps forward suddenly. She rears back, only managing to press harder into the wall. But then he’s draping it softly over her shoulders, pulling her forward to wrap it clear round, knotting the clasp at her neck. 

He steps back, frowning.

More comforts from her butchers. Oh Merlin — she wonders suddenly — will it be _him?_

“When?” she forces out. 

He blinks, brow lifting just slightly. Did he not expect her to know?

“Ten minutes or so,” he answers. A voice hoarser than she remembers. 

Dora nods. She’s gone numb. He might have said any number.

Malfoy draws a wand from his sleeve and this time she’s able to stop herself midway jerking back in fear. Her stifled flinch makes him pause for a moment, but only a moment, before he draws a smooth cast of conjuring through the air. 

A Tempus charm. It appears beside him, glowing and blue and ticking down from ten minutes. 

She can’t help it - 

“A bit much, that?” As though she doesn’t feel each inch of the lowering axe by the second. 

His voice is even and detached when he answers an exhale later. “Necessary.” 

Dora shifts beneath the pooling mass of his still-warm cloak, tucking some under her naked bum. 

“And I’m to spend all ten of my last moments with you, then?”

A quick, humorless smile flashes at the corner of his lips. “I’m afraid so.”

Then she does laugh. “What is this?” she pulls at the collar of his cloak, scoffing. “Really? You’re no gentleman,” she sneers. 

This seems to bore him. He holds her eye. “You’re cold.”

Dora almost snorts. “I’ll be a lot colder in ten minutes.” 

Something hardens in Malfoy’s eyes; his lips tense together, a bleak, straight line. 

In the silence of his response, the rush of truth washes over her. 

“Ah.” Dora breathes. “Won’t be over quickly, then?”

He’s still looking her in the eye. “No.” 

At least he’s frank about it. She’d rather that than lies.

Malfoy glances at the Tempus. One of her minutes, gone. 

Her back straightens. “Tell me.” 

He tilts his head slightly, scanning her face. “Would you not prefer the bliss of ignorance?”

“I’m a long way from bliss, Malfoy. Give it to me. I’d rather know.”

Those pale eyes study her for a long moment. In her mind the seconds are ticking, louder and louder. 

“Very well,” he says. But he offers nothing further. Is she to guess? The clock’s emptying seconds pull the question from her.

“It’s to be you?”

“No.”

She waits, gut clenching. 

“Your aunt,” he offers, finally. 

_Fuck._

Dora swallows. “Sweet Aunty B. Figures.” Her vision goes a bit hazy remembering the mania in that woman’s eyes. “Wouldn’t pass that up, would she.”

Even Malfoy looks nauseated at the thought. The stones at her feet become his sole focus. “It’s a cleansing to her. Reclaiming of her tree. Aside from herself and your newborn son, you are the last remaining Black.”

A new, fierce love thunders in her heart for her cousin, for the boy who couldn’t bring himself to harm as his father did.

“Draco is a Black,” she says. “He may have your name but h—”

“You are the last remaining Black.” Malfoy’s words are as weary as they are final. But laced with warning; edged in ice. 

He’s stopped breathing. She sees agony flare briefly across his face.

No. _No._

Dora cannot stomach the thought. “Draco—”

 _“Do not speak my son’s name,”_ he snaps. The ragged crack in his voice confirms it.

Her mind is reeling. Had Voldemort not spared Draco after all? Was Draco’s unwillingness to take up the wand against his mother his undoing? Or had he not been able to live with…

Dora watches the vacant-eyed man before her, tries to fathom his loss. 

She cannot. 

The Tempus continues to tick, as the tension holds them in silence. She looks. Seven minutes.

“You spat on my shoes in Diagon Alley when you were perhaps...eleven years old. Do you remember that?” He looks back up at her. “Hair wild, a garish fluorescent, like some feral pixie set loose.”

Despite this strange shift, Dora almost wants to smirk at the memory. She’d been so proud of that. 

“Those were dragonhide, you know.” He’s taking off his gloves; vanishing them. Gone is the emotion. His tone is light again. Musing. Easy. As though nothing had just transpired. 

So fucking light and easy. 

“Oh boo hoo _,”_ Dora squints at him, scrunching up her nose _._ “Had to wipe, or no — get your _elf_ to wipe some little halfblood’s spit from your precious boots. The _inconvenience._ ” 

When she’s done, she finds he’s actually smiling at her. Small, but there; just at the corner of his lips. Had he been baiting her?

“She took that same tone with me. From time to time.” 

Dora knows who ‘she’ is, and though it feels as if she should take that as some kind of threat, somehow Dora can’t. It’s fading but his smile is still there. 

Wordlessly they both look to the Tempus. Five minutes, thirty-six seconds. 

“Narcissa loved her family. Your mother included. Fiercely.” 

She can only shake her head and laugh. “So much hate for the ones we love.”

“She didn’t hate either of you.”

“Fooled me.” Dora knows her resentment is on display. Probably a petulant little grimace too close to a pout. But who cares now. She doesn’t want to crave their approval, miss the family she might have had. But she’s human, and being cast-off leaves it’s venom. 

“Andromeda used to write to her. About you,” Malfoy says. “Tell her little things. Narcissa hid the letters, but,” then, casual as anything, he kneels down to sit on the filthy stones in front of her. Close; too close. Only a few feet of space between them.

“I found them once,” he finishes, conjuring something to appear between them with a wave of his wand — two flasks, two glass cups. 

He picks up one flask, opens it, pours the contents into one cup. Dora can smell it. 

“Muggle whiskey, I believe she said?”

_Mum._

“My favorite,” Dora answers, thirsting for it already.

He glances to the Tempus. Four minutes. 

“Well, then.” Malfoy proceeds to open the second flask and pour its contents into the second cup. They are of a different color. He pushes the first cup towards her, scraping it’s way against the cobble. 

A second, less pleasant scent assaults her. She bends forward, just enough to see that the liquid filling her cup is opaque. 

Dora tenses immediately. “This isn't just whiskey.”

When she meets his eye for an explanation he’s already looking at her, with a ‘take your medicine’ kind of patience. 

“Something to dull the pain,” he answers. 

Her brow furrows. Kindness is strange on his face. 

Dora swallows, looking to the Tempus again. Three minutes, twenty seconds. 

Fire-bright adrenaline shoots up her spine. 

He’s watching her, or something through her; as though her face were only a windowpane something was reflected on. 

“If I look long enough... I can almost see her.” His words murmured so quietly Dora wonders if she imagined them. 

The sudden giving way that breaks across his face has her transfixed. A glimpse of some lost, scared boy. His head has tilted slightly to the side as he continues, thumbing the edge of his glass. 

“You always were rather beautiful. Despite all the fanfare and constant alterations. Though you never even cared, did you?” The space between his brows creases. “To have such a thing, and never use it.” 

Her chin lifts. “We’re more than what we look like.”

He smiles slightly at this, but there’s pain in his eyes. He’s never looked so human to her as he answers, “Yes.” 

Malfoy looks back to the Tempus over his shoulder once more. Two minutes, thirty-five seconds. 

As he turns to face her again he takes a slow breath, raising his cup before him. 

Rotating it slightly, Malfoy stares into the glass at what Dora can only assume is the dark liquid or his own reflection. Then, looking at her, he raises it higher.

“To family.” 

There are mere minutes left to her life, and though she cannot know that what he’s given her to drink is as he says, Dora can’t help but cling to the torment that’s still shading his eyes. Maybe she’s lost it. Maybe it just doesn’t matter any more. Somehow, she trusts him. 

And what else is there to toast to at the moment of her death? 

She sees their faces. 

Dora raises her cup.

“To family.” 

In one long gulp, heads tipped back, they drink. 

Before she can fully right herself, before she can register the sharp lurch that tugs in her stomach, she hears his glass hit the stone and feels his hands, gentle but firm, cup her face. 

He leans down then, and softly, he kisses her. Pure human warmth, connection; an aching for it. A kiss genuine and simple and somehow made of nothing more.

She’s shocked still. Her empty glass tumbles from her hand. 

The rolling pitch of her stomach spreads, and through the tingling nausea that’s quickly turned to an all-encompassing, stretching sting, Dora feels the lips that are pressed against hers change. 

Panic spikes but before she can fear what is happening, her lips are changing too. The palms that cup her cheeks are shrinking, softening. 

She pulls back, and sees her own face staring back.

Looking down, her hands are his. Platinum hair traces the sides of her vision. The cloak around her fits. 

With a quick wave of the wand, he — _she_ — vanishes the men’s clothing hanging loose on her body. The her before her is nude. The cups and flasks disappear into thin air. She watches Lucius as herself push his wand into her trembling, awkwardly large hands. 

The palm still resting at her cheek moves below her chin, gently tips it to look into her own eyes, to hear in her own voice - 

“Flask in your pocket. Once I am dead, they'll know.”

He grips her chin hard, holds her gaze. _“Run._ _Keep running.”_

The Tempus glows bright behind him and chimes its end. 

It’s too much. Her mind can’t accept it. Words mean nothing. 

“You...Lucius...” His deep voice strange in her throat. 

_“Let_ me,” he says. 

It’s a plea, a gift he cannot, will not, allow her to refuse. A gift he’s begging her to give.

The door bursts open. 

Dora shoots to standing, unused to the height of her new legs. She’s clutching his wand tight in her fist, trying not to shake. 

The guards nod at her, snake their hands through his now mousy brown hair with a violent pull. They seize him under his bare shoulders. 

As they drag him away from her and towards the door, she stands dazed, holding his gaze.

In the last view of his eyes, she swears there’s something like peace. 

She stares at the open doorway, alone, heart thrumming against the sudden silence. 

_They won’t find us._

No one notices Lucius Malfoy walk calmly through the gathering crowd and out of the building. 

Before the first curse is struck, Dora is gone. 

. . . . 


End file.
